How to Start a Career in Digital Marketing?

How to Start a Career in Digital Marketing?. There’s a common stereotype out in the market that technological companies only recruit developers and programmers. Are they essential for the companies? Absolutely. But as someone who usually assumes that he/she would never work for a tech company because frankly, they haven’t been able to connect a printer to a computer, can say with absolute certainty: one can build a career in technology without learning Java or C++ (or Ruby on Rails or WordPress themes).

If you’re one of the persons looking for a creative role in tech companies that lets you make big-picture plans, write clever copy-paste, and even spend some time chatting with fans or new clients turned friends on Instagram, digital marketing could well be the perfect career for you. That is the reason why we’ve written an all-encompassing guide to building a career in digital marketing, one by one at a time.

The e-commerce and online economy is growing ten times faster than the traditional economy which will eventually result in a huge number of job vacancies starting from early 2020. The best part of this career is that you can develop your technical skills as well as move on to a higher hierarchy at a fast rate.

Due to the lack of supply in demand of Digital Marketing professionals, this career option has become well-paid for those who have experience in the game.

What is digital marketing?

Before we dig deeper, let’s cover the fundamentals.

Digital marketing is a conglomerate term that includes any and almost every one of the online strategies that typical companies use to identify, build, and target an audience in the full hopes of converting them into customers.

Like mainstream marketing, digital marketing focuses on promoting and (hopefully!) selling your product or service to customers. Thanks to the surge of smartphones, marketing no longer is stated as, “Let’s just throw a billboard up.” Marketing strategies have evolved because customers have evolved. That is why digital marketing primarily focuses on how to reach potential customers where they spend their free time online and in highly targeted and relatable ways—an approach that’s often referred to as “conversational” marketing.

That includes anything from social media marketing to paid advertisements on searched sites to search engine optimization (SEO), among other techniques.

And here’s the lucrative part: unlike many industries giving employment opportunities, you don’t need any formal qualifications in order to get started (although some knowledge certainly won’t hurt you, either). Knowledge, talent, and a passion to learn are valued by most employers far higher than academic qualifications. Results value more than a piece of paper.

In fact, until recently, you’d be hard focused to find any professional qualifications that focused primarily on digital. Even now, they are far and few between when compared to other industries and professions.

According to the figurative stats by “Upwork”, the most famous freelancing job website, a whopping 20% of the fastest-growing skills are from the digital marketing area itself and most of its branches such as search engine optimization, social media marketing have seen a whopping 150% rise over the past few years.

Many online surveys being conducted also show that there is a huge skill gap at the moment in the digital marketing field, with many digital marketing managers still working out the challenges to hiring the best talents in the industry, which is almost lacking.

So, if you are looking forward to enrolling in a freelancing career (that is work from home or desk job) in the digital marketing field, trust me on that, you are coming in at the impeccable time when the entire job sector is flooded with ample opportunities in this spontaneous evolving and futuristic field.

Ways to start preparing yourself for entering in digital marketing

Skills needed in the digital marketing field

The Buyer’s way and Sales Funnelling

On the most fundamental level, digital marketers need to fully understand how to “stand out, engage, and delight” (this is how the basic working of any marketing platform) customers to pick them from the “I don’t know anything or idea about this brand or product” stage to “I’m already interested in.” This simple process includes using techniques to better understand your customer (characters, user research, etc.) and strategies for optimizing the sales process (through email marketing, retargeting and much more).

Data Analysis / Analytics

Digital marketers need the application of numbers to understand whether their various campaigns are working. But far importantly, they need the skills to understand those very numbers in order to adjust their strategies and launch new campaigns. And, most imperative thing is that they need to be able to explain the data to other members of their team who may not have the full grasp to understand the purpose of digital marketing.

Content Marketing or Content Strategy

Content marketers and content strategists specialize in using compelling storytelling skills for entertaining to reach new audiences. They do the specified task through blog posts, email campaigns, guides, and even other types of various media like video campaigns and podcasts.

Social Media Marketing

How to Start a Career in Digital Marketing?. Most of us use one or the other form of social media every day. Social media marketing revolves around the strategically using a brand’s various social channels to promote and sell its products. These strategies might include anything from product highlighting to channel giveaways to paid ads (you’ve probably seen some of those on Facebook and even in your Instagram stories and feeds).

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Brands heavily rely on traffic from search engines like Google (yahoo, fine, Bing) to increase brand highlighting and direct new leads. SEO is the process by which brands increase the popularity of the content they write to make it as appealing to Google as possible. The better the highlighted content, the better the search result for the most part—but there are plenty of obstacles, which explains why “SEO specialist” is a full-time job and a side quest. Look fora starter course on SEO on websites. Their digital marketing course includes a short or brief segment on SEO depending if you opting for free or paid content.

Paid Ads

“Paid ads” is another collective term for buying media positions on various channels to highlight your products. This includes social media ads (like the sponsored ads you see in your Instagram news) but also simple display ads (like the ones you see at the top of any search results in Google).

General Tech Skills

These also help digital marketers to acquire some tech skills as well, especially since almost every digital marketing campaigns require a mandate working with a specialized web development team. Some other great supplemental skills to consider HTML & CSS (you can learn those from some free coding websites), basic design principles, and photo cropping editing basics. These are all helpful lists of seven tech skills every digital marketer needs.

The specific mindset and ways to learn Digital Marketing

• Be Patient to Learn the Tactics

This indefinite field is full of various opportunities to choose from, for one to start your Digital Marketing career. Due to its highly updating nature, one has to keep learning the new strategies with time.

You have to definitely make sure to keep yourself updated so as to guarantee you’re at the same pace with the ever-changing technology. You have to look from the basics, bearing all the minuscule details in mind.

So if you by chance miss out on a single course of action, you’ll need to repeat the process again till it’s the desired result.

You have to be patient as it takes time so as to learn every methodology of this emerging and humongous career.

So ready for the second point that’s going to keep helping you have one of the greatest digital marketing careers of all time?

• Be a Constant Learner

Before you decide and dive into starting a career in Digital Marketing, there’s something of great importance you HAVE to know: Digital Marketing is an area that requires spontaneous learning in order for you to have a bright future. As this was discussed briefly in the previous point, let’s look at what this fully means.

No doubt that every career option will demand that from you but the rate of learning in this field is fast when you compare it to other developing careers.

We’re all aware of this aspect that technological development is taking place at a really fast pace.

We know that we need to keep ourselves up-to-date to succeed in this line of business. Or any line of business whether it is in medicine or management studies.

You have to be fully motivated to put in the effort required to achieve success.

• Build Up Your Network

For anyone to succeed when you dive in and start a career in Digital Marketing, you have to get in touch with like-minded or influential professionals who have already established themselves and earning money in the game.

One needs to fully connect and get more information about how they explored this vast miraculous field and how they’ve done differently to make so much money in such a short amount of time.

Networking is all that matters in Digital Marketing.

In fact, if you do not get in touch with experts in this field, you cannot progress as they have.

Also for these reasons you should thank people like Mark Zuckerberg and others who have made social interactions more convenient by launching various social platforms to connect with these prominent personalities.

You can always update yourself with the new emerging trends and news in this sector by following industry leaders.

Not only by just following them, but also sharing, as this particular industry believes that sharing will spread more knowledge.

Apart from all that and what, you can attend seminars, workshops, events or conferences to gain in-depth knowledge and interact with professionals.

• Create Your Online Platform

When one has already known so much about the field, then why not get yourself in the online platform to let other people notice your skills?

Building up your online network is really worth the shot as it teaches you all about surviving in this continuous competition and standing out with the help of your different ideas.

Your online presence on the internet will make you become noticed and looked by different people, and you will acquire an edge over other competitors.

Potential companies can even hire you by just getting a positive impression and working about the way you handle your online media platforms.

• Have Knowledge About Everything But Master One Particular Field

As everyone already told you, Digital Marketing gives various options to choose from as your future career option. This doesn’t mean you need to be master of all.

What I basically mean is that you don’t need to spread your feet and try to cover up everything as possible in one go.

There is a famous saying for this instance “Jack of all trades but master of none”, so you don’t need to have a pinch knowledge of each subject as this area is vast and takes many years to master some let alone everything. Instead, try to take one huge step at a time and have a deep and clear cut knowledge of one specific field.

If your intuitive interest is towards writing, then go for evergreen blogging with full-fledged efforts into it and know every technique related to it.

If you want to launch your own online store to sell products and services, then choose a good e-commerce platform and try to learn everything about it.

At the novice stage, you need to master or try to master one area of expertise and slowly start exploring other fields.

Internet marketers first establish themselves at one particular level and then climb the different ladder to get more!

In conclusion, these are some of the basic points one needs to get started with Digital Marketing. Some may have a different approach as this is not the clear cut way to achieve success, Just read from different information sources and practice them out, because in this field the more you practice the more you will learn of new techniques and the better and appealing you will be.